14 DAY TRIAL // There's a huge debate on Qualcomm's most recent Snapdragon chipset, which is now embedded into many flagship smartphones, including HTC One M9 and LG G Flex 2.
The first benchmarks made with the HTC One M9 revealed that the chipset had some overheating issues. Qualcomm addressed these concerns at that time by saying that the tests were executed with pre-release devices, not with final builds.
In an interview for Forbes, Qualcomm's VP of marketing Tim McDonough said that all the rumors implying that Snapdragon 810 has overheating issues are “rubbish,” and that there were no real problems with the chipset in commercial devices.
He went further and said that “someone very artfully took that and used it to fuel the rumours and took something that’s completely normal and sent it to some less sophisticated news outlets to give them a story.”
Although the only company that had something to gain from all this is Samsung, McDonough refused to speculate on the matter and explained how Qualcomm worked together with the South Korean company on launching the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5.
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“Samsung has always had its own semiconductor lab and its mobile business that run as independent divisions. The handset division has always used some mix of Qualcomm and internally developed products. In the past that mix has gone up and down. In the Galaxy S5 time-frame and the [Galaxy] S4 time-frame it leaned heavily towards Qualcomm but it wasn’t 100%.”
McDonough also answered a question that might have fueled the Snapdragon 810 overheating rumors, which is related to the new LG G4 smartphone announced about a week ago.
Many thought that the fact that LG chose to add the Snapdragon 808 chipset inside the G4 rather than the Snapdragon 810, somewhat confirms the fact that the latter had some issues.
According to McDonough, “These decisions get made 18 months before a phone shows its face. When we were working with LG on the G flex 2 and G4, Qualcomm produced the 810 and 808 around the same time. The simple reason is the design goals of the G4 2k experience.”
Qualcomm hopes to regain some of the lost market share later this year when the company plans to launch the Snapdragon 820 chipset featuring the first cognitive computing platform called “Zeroth.”